The Harleman Chronicles Codex

Field Entry – Day 12

We breached the glacial shelf at first light.

The ice groaned beneath our treads—an ancient threshold cracking open. Beneath its translucent skin shimmered a skyline long forgotten: a city entombed in silence, its spires bowed beneath centuries of frost. Dr. Elen Varis called it a cathedral of cold geometry—vaulted towers of obsidian and fractured glass, laced with frozen veins of bioluminescent script. The light pulsed faintly, like breath held too long.

We descended through a crevasse we named The Maw. Its walls narrowed like the throat of some sleeping colossus. Inside, time unraveled.

There were carvings—not of language, but of memory. Shadows etched in ice, not as symbols, but as moments: a child reaching skyward, a figure kneeling in grief, dancers mid-turn, their joy suspended in crystal. These were not records. They were echoes.

At the base, we activated the beacon.

A pulse answered—deep, slow, and steady. Not mechanical. Not natural. Something in between. It did not speak, but it acknowledged.

We are not the first to stand here.

But we may be the first to listen.